


December 24

by adnarel



Category: The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-17
Updated: 2013-02-17
Packaged: 2017-11-29 15:03:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/688308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adnarel/pseuds/adnarel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In Imladris, Sam and Frodo walk under the trees on the eve of their departure.</p>
            </blockquote>





	December 24

**Author's Note:**

> This work was submitted as part of the Lord of the Rings Secret Santa exchange 2007

The trees serve a chaotic harmony here and there is much to wander into. The paths are real paths, the rivers real rivers and the mounds real mountains. I wander a little restlessly, looking for anything familiar to jog my misplaced memories. I think, in our wandering, I left them home. Even the shapes of leaves are strange. Here, one shaped like a star. Here, like a hand. Other trees have bare branches like the ones that grow in the Old Forest but the trunks twisted weirdly as they sprawled their bodies heavenwards. No memories can be found here, I say to myself, but the comings and goings of the stars are smooth on the ground. 

I miss my home. Under the boughs of the great trees, I look up and I cannot find the branches and I am used to walking under trees I planted or helped set in the ground. But here, the trees are wondrous strange and full of starlight and I know that I was born under the sun, when all things are green and not so old. My mum told me that, when she was baking apple pies that my Great Nana taught her. The kitchen was too warm because of her oven and I was pushed back into the corner, into the sunlight. I touched the smooth bark of a tree whose life far surpassed my own and felt my newness, the bones of my hand, tremble. The bark was smooth, warm, and full of large things. I felt I could have knocked on time itself as I let my knuckles graze a short length of a great root. And the leaves that fell on me have been growing since I have been growing.

Of all things, I miss the sun. The ground is cool beneath my feet and the shadows are too full of secrets. I feel my heart incapable of beating against the shadows, the looming shadows, where things are. I miss the warm grass most. Here, I can go nowhere without my home. Everything here is quiet, too. Quiet with time, quiet with reverence where all I want is a little ale. Just some warm brown ale with one flavor, one clean strong intensity and the comfortable heaviness of a mug. 

Something catches my eye. A small tree is struggling beside a disgruntled bush whose berries lay scattered over the ground. By spring, they will choke each other to death, and the struggling tree, too. I bend over and pass my hands over my slim branches no thicker than my fingers, the trunk no longer than my legs. It could be that, as both my bones and my tree swayed in the wind, I recognized the harmony of their synonymous rustling but suddenly, something comes to me out of the large vault of time and wisdom that has taken me into its bosom and, yet, refuses to make me part of it. I feel the Elven magic in the trees, or I imagine it. Regardless, I lick my lips to taste the peppermint air. 

The same bristling, the same ominous breaking in the wind, is present in my mind from when I was a younger Hobbit, twelve, and when I first met Mr. Frodo who had allowed me, on my father’s request, to take care of a small sapling underneath his kitchen window. Aromas had wafted out to tempt me as I pruned the tree, picked up the leaves and picked off the hungry caterpillars. He had been baking apple pie when I chopped the small tree down for fire wood. 

I grasp the recognition as I paw at the ground heartlessly, thinking that there is too much frost for my hands, warm as they are. I could not recall the exact name of it but I know it and look fondly on the shivering sapling, relishing the shiver in my bones. I break off a small piece of the branch and for a moment there is a scent of cinnamon easily distinguishable from the unrelenting perfume of the surrounding pines. 

I spot Mr. Frodo a short way away, bent over. I know Mr. Frodo fits here. I can hear him whistling as he restlessly shifts on his stone bench, reading Mr. Bilbo’s There And Back Again, a Hobbit’s tale. He’s not nervous anymore, he’s not curling his toes or twitching or fiddling with the button of his shirt or tugging on his left earlobe. He’s merely whistling so I can hear him whistle. Bless him, he knows I don’t like the quietness of the trees. Everything’s heavier here, I kept telling him, like we’re breathing time and holding it in our lungs till it sinks to the earth through our feet. But he just smiles and tells me to think of something else, to look at the trees, to touch the trees, Sam, touch the trees, feel the leaves. The leaves glow under moonlight, I told him. Yes, he said. I tell him, simply, I miss our trees, I miss our air, I miss our Shire. 

He just looks at me strange and tells me, I thought you wanted to see the Elves? The Elves are here, Sam! Yes, and I’m here too and now I’ve got the stories I wanted and they’re not as good without the red glow of a living room fire and the barking dog outside. I don’t like how they look at us, like they know secrets about us that we can’t know. I can’t tell him this but he looks at me strange, tells me to come sit next to him and he puts his hand on my forearm, like he’s afraid I’d go away. But he doesn’t say anything. I want to tell him I can’t hear anything in the silence, much as I listen. Mr. Frodo, sir, I want to go home, I want to tell him. He turns away and I hear the leaves fall as a gust of wind swoops out of the high heavens and a darker shadow falls on his hand on my forearm. His skin is paler than mine; I have been sun-baked by my days in the green gardens. The green gardens don’t exist here. The green gardens are all the layers of shadows and time away from here and we are here where we shouldn’t be but neither of us is alone. I look around at the trees and take as much comfort from them as possible. I feel the sun shining above them and some sunlight falls across my lap. Of all things, Mr. Frodo is sad and with him, my soul is troubled. Time and space have formed around us, the falling leaves eavesdrop on Mr. Frodo’s stillness. 

Will you miss it, Mr. Frodo?

Oh, Sam. And I pulled him towards me, my hands on his hips, fingers pushing past the threadbare cotton of his tucked shirt. His lips graze my forehead and the tip of my nose and his fingers are on the tip of my ears and there is a gush of blood to my cheeks, enough to keep the cold of the trees at bay. I can tell he has no words. More like, he has no hope. I clench my fists on his waist as I feel him tremble. But, he is here nonetheless. Even without hope, he is here. 

It is better to leave this place, to make my exit from strange things. It is not so difficult to leave these things behind. I do not think I would have been able to leave the Shire for Mordor, it is better I depart Rivendell for the Black Land.   
But Mr. Frodo is smiling as he turns back to me and his fingers are tight on my arm, again. I can feel him grasp my bones, infuse them with his warmth and I am a little calmed., I am twelve again and he is telling me about dragons and I feel safe, far removed from the trouble of dragons, their gold and their dwarves. 

Of course I will, Sam. 

He removes his grip and stands up, walks away and the silence is complete without him and I wonder why I can not remember the first time I met him. Too much sadness here and my skin prickles. 

I would not want these moody trees in the shire. Their twisting branches obscure the sky like clouds and I would never feel the earth warm under my feet. Hobbits dig their toes into the ground, stamp their feet on the cobbles and the uncovered bridges to move their blood. These trees arrest time, tangle sun, noon, tea time and brunch in its leafy shades, shackle everything in an obscure twilight. Permanence and vigilance. They keep Time in, I feel, when Hobbits make Time for food or leisure or sleep. It is simpler, in my mind, to be a hobbit, whose only time is Now, whose past and present and future are merely assemblages of leaves against the sun, not the constellations of stars in the night sky. Well, Mr. Frodo is going.


End file.
